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News & Views From the Front Line
Thursday, 12 February 2009
District Heating in Brum
I spent yesterday in Birmingham looking at the Utilicom District Heating Scheme which is growing fast organically like their Southampton example. The initial scheme for Broad Street proved the principle, another cluster is under development with a hospital and Aston University and they are now planning to build a network around every rebuilt school in the city. The schemes are gas CHP with biomass being added soon.The generic lessons you can take from this example to apply to any large scale environmental project are:
1. A reinforcement of the "evolution, not revolution" principle – grandiose schemes will usually collapse under their own weight. Start small and stable and grow.
2. Build a flexible business model – Utilicom sell heat, coolth and electricity, but each client gets what they need – some get all three, others get just one etc.
3. If you want to work with a Local Authority, take as much risk out of the equation as you can (Utilicom take 100% of the risk in this case). No matter how good your scheme is, gambling with tax payers’ money is not in the Local Authority psyche.
Labels: chp, district heating
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
0 Comments
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Hot & Cold in Southampton
Yesterday morning I visited the Southampton District Energy Scheme. It supplies not only heat (some of which comes from a geothermal source) but also cooling and electricity (through trigeneration combined heat & power). And the headline stats are impressive:- over 40 customers
- 12 000 tonnes CO2 per year avoided
- reduced costs for clients
But what really interested me is how the scheme has evolved over the last 21 years from humble beginnings - just the Civic Centre to begin with (with geothermal only) and then spreading out across the city centre to other large users and adding CHP units as and when necessary.
There is a raft of evidence that this 'evolution, not revolution' approach for large distributed sustainability projects is the best way forward by a country mile, but yet again and again proposals come forward that try to solve all problems at once, but only if about 20 partners sign up and a huge wodge of public money is chucked in the pot. The evolutionary approach has made the Southampton scheme robust, effective and self financing - just like the famous energy scheme developed by Woking Council. Grandiose schemes which require a colossal injection of public funds more than often don't get off the drawing board and if they do, usually collapse under their own weight.
Labels: carbon emissions, chp, district heating
# posted by Gareth Kane : 15:23
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
